Two years of research had just been completed. It was last June 6 (Thursday). David, Javi, Pablo and José Antonio, four rank-and-file police officers, one of those they call “on the basic scale”—but with an average of ten years spent in the Hortaleza district of Madrid—were anxiously awaiting the arrival of the GOIT Technical Interventions Group. to the agents of the Underground Unit and those of the Scientific Police at the door of that small house in Aldea del Fresno. It was almost a shed, with a gabled roof and two barred windows that overlooked the plot that surrounded it. It was the last place they had left to search in search of Francisco de Pablo, a young man from the San Lorenzo neighborhood, who had vanished at the age of 32 and without prior notice on March 21, 2022. His mother, Juana, had placed Three days later, a complaint was filed at the police station on the corner, from which these four agents enter and leave daily to deal with complaints of robberies, thefts, sexual assaults and many brawls and brawls between old and new drug addicts.
Despite the fact that the judge of the investigating court number 7 of Plaza Castilla closed the case because he understood that it could be a voluntary disappearance, the insistence of the mother, desperate because no one seemed to care about the whereabouts of her son, and the many rumors that They were running through the neighborhood, they led the agents to investigate a little more about what happened to Francisco during his overtime. In the Police, homicides are normally carried out by specialized groups. But as long as there is no body there is no homicide, so disappearances are often investigated by district police stations.
Through their investigations, they discovered that on the afternoon of his disappearance, Francisco, who—according to investigators—dealed with drugs and used his rented apartment in the neighborhood as a meeting and buying and selling point, had been there with two other people. The many testimonies collected among the parish of drug addicts who frequented that place had at least two coincidences: Francisco left his house that afternoon with a young man of the same age named Israel and they got into a red car. However, Israel, a construction employee, always maintained that they had been playing the Play Station, and that, although they went out together, they separated at the front door.
The rumors continued from word of mouth in the San Lorenzo neighborhood: “Francisco is working as a slave in the house of a marchioness who appears in the magazine Hello“, “they shot him in Valdemingómez”, “he is trapped in a house in La Cañada”, “he was taken away by an Albanian mafia”…
Filing the case did not help, and almost a year passed before the agents, supported by their chief commissioner and veteran investigator, were able to reopen it, providing evidence that it did not appear to be a “voluntary disappearance.” The judge of the 37th opened the file and began to admit the persistent requests of four district police officers, established as seasoned investigators under the conviction that Israel was involved in Francisco’s disappearance: “He was the last one who had seen him alive, he had received money from him to start a semi-hydroponic (marijuana) business on one of his family’s farms in Mejorada del Campo, but he had spent it all on coke, prostitutes and slot machines, and his mother-in-law owned a car red that Israel used from time to time and that had opportunely ended up in a scrap yard days after Francisco’s disappearance,” they argued.
By the time the police requested the phone geolocations, many had already been erased. Fortunately, someone had the foresight to request a “safeguard” of the phones and the agents were able to verify that Israel and Francisco arrived in Mejorada by car, that they were not alone, but with another of their usual companions, Fernando, the third party in this police story. That they then went to a Bricomart and bought bags of soil to make cement and vinyl floor boards. And that they went to a scrapyard where, when the agents arrived, they only had the photographs of the red car they left, curiously with the back seats torn off. But Israel did not appear in any of these financial transactions.
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They interrogated him, let him know that he was the number one objective of a budding investigation and for a month they listened to his phone, with prior judicial authorization. Israel never said anything about the matter in its talks nor made any false moves. However, the police found that he was “a compulsive liar, who did not tell the truth even to the doctor”, a “professional trickster” capable of obtaining money from anyone, “a swindler” who had deceived even his own family, a very tough guy, but whose nerves betrayed a slight wheezing in his chest because he suffered from asthma.
Some time later, while the police were combining their daily work at the station with an investigation that seemed to have no end or direction, an anonymous tip arrived at the station: “It said that one night Fernando, drunk and drugged, had said that they had killed Francisco in Mejorada and taken him to Israel’s parents’ house in Aldea del Fresno and put him in a septic tank under the kitchen floor.” It was a plausible version, because it included one of the addresses that the agents had marked for registration, and gave new details: a kitchen in a house with a septic tank.
Fernando, already detained at the police station, said that “it was Israel who killed Fernando with a blow to the head with a steel bar because they had argued over money in Mejorada,” where they planned to set up a marijuana crop. He said that Israel then called him to help him get rid of the body and they tried to throw it into a well – one of the first places that the Hortaleza police officers unsuccessfully inspected – but there was no room and they finally decided to take it to the house of the parents of Israel in Aldea del Fresno. They carried him in the back seats of the car, which were covered in blood and that is why they tore them off before taking it to the scrapyard.
On June 6, to the expectation of the four agents, members of the Technical Interventions group forced the gate of that small house in Aldea del Fresno, where Israel’s own parents would also arrive minutes later: “This floor has been for 40 years without changing,” the father told the police when they were chipping away at the kitchen tiles. The discovery of the first Bricomart bag in the hole denied him. Then they took out some beer cans, parts of a barbecue and, finally, human remains and a silver bangle on which one could read in capital letters: “Fran.”
Israel was detained that same day. Seconds before his confession, still in the police vehicle, the agents heard that slight whistle from his chest again. He and Fernando have been imprisoned accused of murder.
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